XRP Ledger bug fix slips to Nov. 4 after a two-hour vote dip

A short dip in validator support has pushed the XRP Ledger's latest bug fix from Oct. 23 to Nov. 4, CoinDesk reported. The amendment, fixCleanup3_4_0, was less than two days from switching on when its countdown reset. We flagged on Monday that it had no votes to spare; that turned out to matter.

How XRPL amendments pass

• Who votes: validators, the independent servers that agree on which transactions count. The default trusted list has 35.
• Threshold: more than 80% must back a change, which means 29 validators.
• The clock: support is checked about every 15 minutes and must hold at every check for 14 days in a row. One miss resets the countdown to zero.
• Offline counts as no: a vote only counts if the network hears from that validator at the check, so a server that is restarting at the wrong moment has the same effect as a "no".

What happened

Neither tracker shows which validators dropped out.

What the fix changes

According to the xrpld 3.4.0 release notes, the patch closes a loophole that, under certain conditions, could let an account authorised only to burn an issuer's tokens create new ones. It also adjusts how vault and lending code calculates amounts and decides when a loan is late or in default.

That code belongs to the lending system Ripple has pitched to banks and payment firms since June, in which lenders park XRP or other tokens in vaults and a broker lends them out for a fixed term. It is not live yet and still lacks the support to start its own two-week countdown. For context on how such on-chain lending differs from the over-collateralised kind, see what is DeFi, and for how validators secure proof-of-stake-style networks, proof of work vs proof of stake.